This past weekend, female student athletes returned to campus to celebrate fifty years of women’s varsity athletics at Yale as part of a year-long commemoration of Title IX, the groundbreaking gender equity law passed as part of the Education Amendments of 1972. Title IX banned sex discrimination in federally funded education programs, and made a lasting impact by increasing the participation of girls and women in athletics. The week before, also in celebration of “the 37 words that changed everything,” the Sports Hall of Fame in my hometown of Manchester, CT, inducted an all-female class, one of whom was my twin sister, Meg. Her class included a high school and college soccer star, a state champion swimmer, now principal of our former High School, and a swimming and basketball star who was a year behind us.

Meg started running when she was in fifth grade as a member of the Saint James School running club, which basically consisted of running fence loops twice a week at our town’s high school in preparation for our town’s Thanksgiving Day Road Race. It was all in good fun, until one afternoon. At the end of practice, two of our classmates assured Meg that they would beat her in the race, simply because she was a girl. They didn’t realize it then, but those two boys presented Meg with her first goal, which was to beat them on Thanksgiving morning. She began training in earnest the very next day, coached by my late grandfather. Meg not only accomplished her goal, handily, but over the next year she began to establish herself as a local running legend, all before she reached junior high. One Thanksgiving, when it was particularly cold, someone gave Meg “a flat” just about 400 meters into the race. She lost one of her shoes and went down hard on the near frozen ground. Someone (who remains unknown to this very day) literally picked Meg up off the ground, put her back on her feet, gave her a shove forward to keep her from getting trampled by the pack (12-15,000 deep) and yelled “GO!” And “GO!” she did – and she never looked back – running the next four miles with one shoe. It’s a story that local runners still talk about today.

When Meg was establishing her place early on in Manchester sports history, I was playing video games, taking a break only briefly during the winter club swimming season. It wouldn’t be until the fall of our first year in high school that I would finally follow in her footsteps, when her coach suggested that she tell her brother to try running as a way to get in shape and make friends. And lucky for me, he assured, “no one gets cut from the cross-country team.”

From 1995-97, Meg was the fastest female high school runner in the Manchester Road Race. And this coincided with an outstanding high school running career, making the All-Conference, All-State and All-New England teams for four straight years, a legacy that remains unmatched by any athlete in any sport from our town. Meg acknowledges that she was not “blessed with God-given talent,” but with a strong work ethic, the support of some key people along the way (including family, friends, mentors and even a couple of rivals) and faith.

I am super proud of Meg, and felt quite honored to be her twin on that Sunday afternoon. And when I think of the courageous women who paved the way for generations of athletes like Meg and her fellow inductees, I feel really grateful for Meg, who basically paved the way for me, to one day become a runner.